Urmila Nidra: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Ramayana Narrative

  • Unique Paper ID: 199954
  • Volume: 12
  • Issue: 12
  • PageNo: 659-662
  • Abstract:
  • This article re-reads the Ramayana through Urmila, wife of Lakshmana, whose fourteen-year sleep is both the condition for male heroism and a site of narrative erasure. Using feminist mythmaking as method, the article argues that Urmila Nidra is not passive absence but a political text that exposes the gendered economy of sacrifice in epic dharma. Drawing on textual, folk, and theoretical archives, it theorizes sleep as gendered labor, refusal, and sisterly imbalance. The study situates Urmila within contemporary feminist discourse on invisible labor, military wives, and migration, contending that to wake the epic up we must first listen to the room where Urmila slept.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{199954,
        author = {Sri Panchadarla Appala Konda},
        title = {Urmila Nidra: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Ramayana Narrative},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {12},
        pages = {659-662},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=199954},
        abstract = {This article re-reads the Ramayana through Urmila, wife of Lakshmana, whose fourteen-year sleep is both the condition for male heroism and a site of narrative erasure. Using feminist mythmaking as method, the article argues that Urmila Nidra is not passive absence but a political text that exposes the gendered economy of sacrifice in epic dharma. Drawing on textual, folk, and theoretical archives, it theorizes sleep as gendered labor, refusal, and sisterly imbalance. The study situates Urmila within contemporary feminist discourse on invisible labor, military wives, and migration, contending that to wake the epic up we must first listen to the room where Urmila slept.},
        keywords = {Urmila, Ramayana, feminist mythmaking, nidra, subaltern studies, gendered labor, Hindu epic, epic feminism},
        month = {May},
        }

Cite This Article

Konda, S. P. A. (2026). Urmila Nidra: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Ramayana Narrative. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 12(12), 659–662.

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